Chosen Read Free Page A

and she’s known it all the time. ‘She’s always been depressed. Sort of a bit ill. In the head.’
    â€˜Ah,’ Donna says, cosily, ‘a history of depression.’
    Dodie hears the body being taken down. Rod comes back, face ashen. A guy takes her fingerprints, and Rod’s, to rule them out. ‘My brother’s prints will be here as well,’ she says. She tells Donna about Seth and the relatives in America.
    â€˜Address?’ Donna says.
    â€˜I’d just popped round to get it from my mum.’
Popped
, she thinks,
popped
? She’d never say that, not in real life.
    Donna gives her a curious look and jots busily. ‘Empty nest syndrome?’ she speculates.
    â€˜This her writing?’ A policeman wearing maggot-coloured gloves holds the bag from Stella’s head under Dodie’s nose.
I die at my own hand and of my own free will. Stella M. Woods.
It’s written on the bag, definitely in Stella’s writing. ‘Deceased two to three days,’ he adds.
    A police van comes to take the body away. ‘Looks cut and dried to me,’ Donna says. ‘History of depression. Empty nest. Another cuppa? Shame there isn’t any sugar.’ Donna puts her cup down on the wood with no coaster; Stella would go mental. ‘It’s not up to me to speculate, of course. There’ll have to be an inquest.’
    Dodie looks at the table. Stella’s last puzzle – the sun glinting off the Grand Canal, the laugh of the handsome gondolier, the stripy stockings – is complete.
    â€˜I was here on Friday,’ Dodie says. ‘She was wearing the same dress.’
    â€˜How did she seem?’
    â€˜Weird,’ Dodie says weakly.
    â€˜There you are then.’
    â€˜But she was . . .’ she begins,
always weird
she nearly says, but it would seem disloyal. She starts to take apart the puzzle, then changes her mind, puts the pieces back one by one, there and there and there.
    â€˜You get home now,’ Donna says. ‘Get some sugar inside you. Or a stiff brandy.’ She smiles and a dimple flickers in her cheek. ‘Try and get some shut-eye.’
    Rod takes her arm as they go out. A policeman drives them home. It’s still raining and the wipers squeak a rhythm,
cut and dried, suicide, cut and dried, suicide
. ‘You OK?’ Rod says.
    â€˜I should have gone back,’ she says. ‘On Friday, she sort of reached out . . .’
    â€˜Don’t go there.’ Rod squeezes her knee as they round the corner.
    The streets are all wet and glittering orange; the street-lights zizz past the windows like sparklers. In the house, Dodie runs straight up for a peek at Jake. Breathing, snug and warm and safe.
    â€˜What a little sweetheart,’ the neighbour says, looking up from her knitting. ‘Not a peep out of him, not a peep.’ She finishes her row and squeaks her needles into the ball of yarn. ‘I hope everything’s all right?’ Her nostrils lift, testing the air for gossip.
    â€˜Fine,’ Dodie says firmly.
    The neighbour waits, eyes sharpening behind her specs.
    â€˜We’re shattered,’ Rod says, and she takes the hint and leaves. ‘Any time,’ she says round the edge of the door. ‘Little angel, up there, any time.’
    â€˜Thanks so much.’ Dodie sinks down onto a kitchen chair, elbows on the table. Rod’s face is grey. A terrible shockfor him too, of course, to see, actually to stumble into the corpse. That’s an awful word. Not Stella any more, not a she or a her, but an it. A corpse in a velvet dress. Why would you start to cut up a carrot and then – but,
it
, despair, whatever, could strike as easily at that moment as at any other. It could strike you at any time. You could start chopping a carrot and then think, what for? What is the point of this? Your daughter could come round and then leave, leave you all alone with your half-chopped carrot and